Monday is an unusual moment: the country is far from recovered from the last month’s relentless battering by storms, but the government has removed the ‘calamity status’ protection from the worst affected municipalities, and consequently the exemption for residents from motorway charges has also gone – and this is in spite of the fact that dozens of local roads are still impassable.
Yesterday, ‘experts’ were already querying the new state of affairs, positing that it will take at least three weeks for conditions to return to normal (and that is not meaning that businesses and factories affected will be anything like rebuilt and back at work).
On his first ‘opinion slot’ commenting on national issues, Liberal MEP and former presidential candidate João Cotrim de Figueiredo, suggested that total damages faced by this country will be far in excess of the €4 billion estimated by prime minister Luís Montenegro some days ago (and no one at this point is aware where all the money to fix damaged homes and infrastructure will be coming from).
For the full tally to be properly assessed floodwaters have to have completely receded – and in the Mondego basin, for example, mayor of Montemor-o-Velho, José Veríssimo, has said this will take weeks.
Just the little village of Ereira – cut off from the rest of the country by floodwaters for the last three weeks – is expected to remain in its not-so-splendid isolation for as much as another week. The situation is not being helped by the fact that rain is still falling in the north and centre, albeit not in any kind of ‘alarming’ quantities.
So today is definitely a kind of ‘lull’ in what will undoubtedly lead on to ‘a political storm’, from which the government may find it very difficult to emerge in ‘good shape’.
In many ways, Portugal’s troubles are only just beginning. The ‘great debate’ on the government’s handling of this crisis has been twice delayed (as a result of the bad weather, and need for government representatives to be in various parts of the country) – but now it is looking like it will take place on Thursday, and it won’t be ‘easy’. Opposition parties have up till now remained relatively quiet. Thursday is likely to see all that change.
Source material: SIC/ Diário de Notícias
